Spring quarter blog post

We just completed our fourth week of the quarter and officially have fully planted all of our cacao seeds! We needed to prepare a lot for the growth experiments to ensure that all the data that we needed was ready to be taken with the proper tools, so the past week was spent solidifying our foundational procedures so that future weeks will go by smoothly.  

First, we brought the fresh cacao pods to the farm and were able to, for the first time, see raw cacao with our own eyes instead of online! It was a really cool experience.

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¾ of the TCHO team taking a picture with one of the cacao pods we received.

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Weighing and opening the pod.

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We then sorted through the seeds to make sure none had sprouted already and picked out some that looked unfit to grow, then placed them in a bucket of water for germination. At this moment, we started a new venture on documentation: vlogs and videos! We wanted to find a way to capture our process more holistically and share it with everyone, so we decided to take this on. Our plans for this are to compile as much (relevant) documentation as possible, then at the end of the quarter consolidate it into something presentable. To start this off, we made a timelapse of our team members sorting through the cacao seeds! 

After this, we placed the bucket in the greenhouse near the cacao pots so that once the seeds were germinated, we could plant them. For the rest of the week, our team scheduled shifts such that we could visit the farm once a day from Monday to Saturday, and we logged our progress and visits in a new spreadsheet.

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Farm Log / Journal, filled out for Week 3 and 4

By Wednesday, two seeds had germinated; Thursday, another two. By Friday, most if not all the seeds had germinated. As per daily visit, we would water the okra and change the germination water, and when seeds were ready, they were immediately planted. We developed and followed a chart to keep track of all our pots, and seeds were planted in pairs that corresponded to “opposite but matching” levels of biochar and compost. For example, the first two seeds planted were in pots 1 and 6, 5% with biochar and compost respectively in the first pot and just 5% biochar in the latter pot.